Seeing the Frame

June 20th 2026

This week, with the help of AI, I created a simulation, which I ran with a group of Masters' students.

They became the executive committee of a fictional biotechnology company facing a series of difficult decisions. The company had developed a promising treatment for a rare disease, which could potentially help thousands of patients. But pursuing it would come at a cost: jobs were at risk, communities could be affected, financial sustainability was uncertain and competitors were moving quickly. There was clearly no right answer, no "good decisions", only trade-offs.

The decisions themselves were not what interested me the most. What mattered was how quickly people began constructing stories about what was happening and what those stories made visible - or invisible - to them. One group said that their first responsibility was to patients. Another emphasized responsibility to employees and the local community. Others focused on long-term sustainability or innovation. All logical and reasonable positions.

What was fascinating was how quickly each team began interpreting every new piece of information through the lens they had created: when negative media attention appeared, when uncertainty increased, etc. Some saw in them the sign that they needed to move faster while others decided to slow down. When new evidence emerged, it rarely changed the underlying frame, it was like it was absorbed into it.

30 minutes in, a participant joined the session and I did my best to help him get a precise idea of what the facts were. He then joined a group that immediately began "bringing him up to speed" like it would be the case for any new hire in the real world. They explained their priorities, their values, their rationale. Explained or imposed?

What they did not do was ask him what he saw. And instead of taking advantage of a fresh perspective, they "helped" him adopt the perspective they already had. I see organizations doing so all the time - framing it as inclusion. They onboard people into the prevailing assumptions before seizing the chance to learn from what the fresh eyes notice.

The most important lesson of the exercise was about seeing. Much of today's leadership literature focuses on making better decisions. But, before we decide, we perceive. Before we act, we interpret. Before we solve a problem, we decide what kind of problem we believe it is. The stories we tell ourselves shape what we notice, what we ignore, what feels possible, and what feels unthinkable.

For me, the challenge is not that we have frames, it is that we are unaware of them and become convinced that our interpretation is reality itself. We hold on to the meaning we assign to what is going on as if our identity was tied to it.

One of the students remarked that in real life - like in our fast paced simulation - there is rarely enough time and information to make "perfect" decisions. That is true: we all operate under conditions of uncertainty, pressure, and incomplete knowledge, which may be precisely why learning to see our own frames matters so much. Slowing down would give us a chance to notice the stories we are inhabiting before they begin making decisions for us. Generating a set of different interpretations early on when meeting a challenge would help us notice that the situation itself is often less limiting than the story we tell ourselves about it...